Friday, August 24, 2012

What's Cooking: A walk down my kitchen's products for the past two weeks

School has started for two weeks and the workload has just gotten tougher and tougher.. Nevertheless, I've still found some time to do some baking here and there.. I won't deny that it's tough to manage both school, personal work and baking/cooking at the same time. Nevertheless, I'll still try my best! (:

Here are some of my products of from the past 2 weeks! (:

My hands were itchy and I woke up early on my off day from lessons to bake this mini version of the usual Barbie Doll Cake.. I did my version, the Kelly Cake! (: Love the soft strawberry sponge cake coupled with chocolate ganache! Suitable for a smaller party but still carrying the beauty of a doll cake!

I also baked some Mini Nutella and marshmallow croissants! Truth be told, rolling puff pastry in Singapore whereby the humidity is CRAP is almost impossible! Nevertheless, I love these warm and they just tasted so good cos it's marshmallows and Nutella!

There was an order for Rainbow Cake last week so I had 6 layers of beautiful colours baked! I just love how beautiful the colours looked stacked together!

And since the fav boy is sooooo into bartending, I had this craving for Orange Juice (Florida's more pulp, no less) with Vodka! I was a lil' too generous with the Vodka (Vodka 100 in the black bottle) so the drink was heavy! Nevertheless, it was still very refreshing! Perfect for the Monday-off-in-lieu public holiday!

This Wednesday, I wanted to bake some Pineapple tarts, the semi-wrapped version! I prepared my pineapple jam from scratch and I loved it! However, I guess the humidity's to blame again.. and my ignorance to the humidity.. the batter/dough became very oily as the butter melted. By the time the tarts were baking, they were 'deep frying' in the butter from the tarts ): The tarts may look reasonably pretty but they were pretty hard! Guess I should do my baking in my air-conditioned room in future! XD

I also played with the flavoured chocolate I had.. I made some strawberry, banana and grape mini Mushrooms! Love how the strawberry one tastes but.. the banana one was overwhelming. Once again, I was LAZY (who isn't?) and I didn't melt the chocolate over a double boiler and I simply dunked the entire sealed piping bag into a bowl of almost hot water.. the chocolate didn't melt enough for it to fall nicely into place inside the mould. Nevertheless, it was still good! (:

I'm such a fan of Richard Goh so I decided to jump on the bandwagon and attend his icing and creaming class though I can pretty much do most of the stuff in his class.. I really appreciate his tips and true enough, this Blueberry Cake I baked using my home-made sponge cake I brought for his class looked so good with the cream! His tips for creaming made my creaming skills improve by leaps and bounds! Stay tuned for my version of tips in the weeks to come, adapted from RG's class! (:

Btw, the cake was so soft and good! It was also well-received by friends who I gave slices to! ((: Such joy!

Being such a fan of RG, I attended his Mooncake lesson as well. We baked 2 snow skin mooncakes: Pandan snowskin with pandan paste and melon seeds as well as Yellow snowskin with durian paste and melon seeds.

I love traditional mooncakes way more than Snow skin mooncakes. Maybe I'm just old-school like this XD We baked White Lotus mooncakes with melon seeds and salted egg. I'm such a sucker for salted eggs I tell you! (: Now, I'm still contemplating if I should bake mooncakes this year.. After all, it's not something that we eat very often and no one eats it in large quantities (unless it's my boyfriend we're referring to)! I'm thinking of baking it and giving it away as gifts to the family and loved ones.. We shall see how it goes.. I'm gonna go shopping for it! (: